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Mozilla releases Thunderbird 8 Beta

Mozilla has published the first beta of version 8.0 of the open source Thunderbird news and email client. Compared to previous Thunderbird version updates, the development release offers very few changes, some of which focus on add-ons. According to the Releases wiki, it will arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.

Like Firefox 8 Beta, when launched, the new Thunderbird beta detects new third-party add-ons that have been installed and disables them by default until they have been approved by the user. When upgrading to 8.0, users will also be presented with a one-time dialogue to approve previously installed add-ons. Other changes include easier access to attachment lists, various Gecko platform fixes, and several user interface fixes and improvements. The Thunderbird team asks developers to test their add-ons with the new version and update for compatibility purposes as soon as possible.

More details about the beta can be found in the release notes. This Beta Channel release of Thunderbird 8.0 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's site. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find. The current stable version is Thunderbird 7 from 27 September.